THE MASTER PLAN: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF AN IDEA (COMPREHENSIVE COMMUNITY, DEMOCRACY)
Abstract
This study examines the role of the master plan in American planning thought. Based on a textual analysis of master plans from a wide range of cities, it hypothesizes that the master plan has been an attempt to design both the physical and social character of the city. The author's main contention is that the master plan's existence as a comprehensive and unified scheme for urban life presupposes a specific social model for the city. This dissertation, therefore, studies the nature and evolution of this model. For the first generation of planners, the master plan expressed the belief that the city existed as a community. To planners such as John Nolen, F. L. Olmsted Jr., and Daniel Burnham, the inception of the master plan in 1907 with the St. Louis and Roanoke, Virginia plans represented an effort to coordinate the physical development of the city as well as the means of joining all of the citizens in the realization of a common project. This study argues, however, that this notion of the plan as an expression of community underwent a transformation in the twenties. Mirroring the increasing professionalization of American life and the rising stature of science in modern thought, the plan became conceptualized between World War I and the Great Depression more as a scientific generation of community performed by experts than as a communal venture. Culminating in the schemes for urban renewal in the forties and fifties, this movement towards the professionalization of the plan changed the focus of the plan from the achievement of collective objectives by the citizens to the creation of functional integration of the city by the planners. Yet, by the mid-sixties this goal of functional integration was seriously questioned. Due to mounting pressure from citizens' groups and the inability to reach a consensus on any overall design for the city, most planners by the late sixties abandoned the belief that a single plan could impose unity on the city. This thesis concludes that this newly limited view of the plan's role has led planners to adopt a more pluralistic model for urban life.
Degree
Ph.D.
Subject Area
Urban planning|Area planning & development
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